CSS is intended to properly style HTML pages. Instead of content trapped in table cells (it was common at one point to layout text and images in invisible tables) and font styles described, “in-line”, CSS is a separate file that defines format across a single or multiple web pages.

To avoid involving style changes when you only want to change content, and visa versa, CSS effectively separates data and design. In many cases it’s extremely effective. If you want to change the fonts on 10,000 pages you can do it in one file in CSS while in-line formatting would require changing 10,000 files.

A site called CSS Zen garden was famous for showcasing user submitted CSS files based on a single html page producing dramatically different results as each CSS file was applied. Unlike table design, CSS gives you the freedom to do things like move a vertical column on the left to a horizontal header from a remote file and across several pages.

This, in my opinion, is where some of the fantasy emerged. You could in theory radically change a websites appearance simply by changing the CSS to the point of a total redesign. In actual practice I’ve never seen this happen. There are certainly some sites that would be the exception but most redesigns I’ve been a part of have also involved content changes and the creation of brand new HTML and CSS.

It’s not that CSS shouldn’t be used for styling a website. My point is we should understand its limits on a technical level and on a conceptual level.

The desire for a pure CSS site may be critical for some websites and be an over indulgent waste of time and client resources for other projects. I occasionally see web posts where people claim they have spent about a week or more to almost prefect the menu style they want in pure CSS to work across all browsers. WHY!
Some of these practices are almost the anthesis to the very purpose and power of CSS.

Just to underscore how much we have been brainwashed by CSS crusaders Shawn from W3C actually apologized for suggesting the use of tables in modern web design (instead of pure CSS). This deserves a shout: IT’S OK TO USE TABLES FOR TABULAR DATA. It’s much easier and if you neglect to do so you cause accessibility problems.

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